To
William Wright (Dan De Quille)
per Unidentified Stenographer
5 January 1876 • Hartford, Conn.
(MS: CLjC, UCCL 01296)
(SUPERSEDED)
(Stenographic letter.)1
Hartford, Conn., Jany. 5th 1876
Dear Dan:—
Yours of Nov. 30th arrived some time ago, but I have been on the sick list for more than a month, and have written no letters. I am now trying to clean up the batch.
I have not seen Bliss to talk business with him for more than a month, and I do not really know whether he has even begun the book or not.2 Yesterday was the first time I have been down town in a long time, and I called there but Bliss was out of town.3 It is about time they were getting to work on the book, and you must write and keep Bliss reminded of that. You don’t know his slow ways as well as I do else you would write him every forty-eight hours. I shall try to stir him up when I get hold of him again.
The artist is almost done making the pictures for my next book, and he told me he supposed he was to begin on the sketches for yours next.4
I should think the new chapters you propose would be an admirable addition to the volume.
If I had Joe Goodman’s money and his brains I don’t think I would fool away the one and rack the other running an evening paper—or any other kind. But I suppose it is hard to get over old habits.5
Steve’s loss is sad enough. He is a brave boy to be able to go on working under it; it is something I am afraid I could not do.6
Billy has waited a long time—but it is never too late to do well, and to marry is to do well.7
Yes, you hope to go to Oakland!
But I begin to believe that if you owned a Bonanza you would rot away there in Virginia City and never leave. But keep on living in Sutro Tunnel8 and possibly you may make up your mind to retire to California yet, and be content to be comfortable.9
Yrs Ever
Mark
(Same old quill I used to use when we worked in the stable—she’s an awful ink-devourer.)10
Explanatory Notes
Steve Gillis, I fear, is sort of going to the dogs. He has two children living—his wife died five
or six years ago. Two years ago he could have cleared up to $60,000 or $80,000 out of Sierra Nevada; but he
neglected the opportunity and is penniless now. Moreover I hear he has taken to drink, and has had the delerium
tremens once or twice. He was on the Enterprise the last I heard. The Sierra Nevada mine, originally discovered in 1859, had “been before the public many times as a
prospective bonanza. In 1878 the stock suddenly bounded from five dollars a share up to $260, when it began to recede.
. . . There are numbers of persons who still have confidence in the mine” (Angel 1881 , 57, 612).
All words written or dictated by Samuel L. Clemens (Mark Twain) are in the public domain if they were first published before 1923. All words written or dictated by Mark Twain which were published between 1923 and 2002, and their copyrights renewed where required by law, are copyright © by Richard A. Watson and J.P. Morgan Chase Manhattan Bank as trustees of the Mark Twain Foundation, which reserves all reproduction or dramatization rights in every medium. All editorial transcriptions, reconstructions, decipherments, explanatory comments, identifications of correspondents, places, and dates are copyright © 1988, 1990, 1992, 1995, 1997, 2002, 2006, 2007, and 2009 by The Regents of the University of California. This digital document was produced as part of Mark Twain Project Online (MTPO), a digital critical edition of all of Mark
Twain's writings. It was encoded in accordance with the Mark Twain Project TEI DTD version 3.0, a modified version of Text Encoding
Initiative (TEI) P4 DTD (<http://www.tei-c.org/>). Initial transcription of the text was performed in Corel WordPerfect
11. XML encoding was performed using <oXygen/> XML Editor 6. For information about the editorial policy of the Mark Twain Project and how it was applied to texts in the Mark Twain Digital
Project, see the guide to editorial practice published with this text.
Va. City Nev. Jan. 9, 1876. Dear Mark.— I am utterly in the dark in regard to what is being done in Hartford. I wrote to ‸Mr‸
Bliss last Sunday and requested him to let me know how he is getting on. I sent him three
prefaces, but don’t know that any one among them is worth a cent. However, he may be able to make one out of the three. I
have also thought it might be well enough to have a dedication in it, so inclose one Mr. Loomis, who was at work on the Enterprise in my place while I was in Hartford, is going to the Centennial and has will probably remain there some
months. Nevada will have a quartz mill there, working ores from the “big bonanza”. Now all who are interested in
the quartz mill and the processes in use in it will want to carry away with them a book that will not only tell them all about the
‸mill and the‸ processes, but also all about the silver mines. What Loomis would like to do would be to take his stand at
this Centennial mill and peddle out the books—“Big Bonanza”—to those who will be duffing
for them. He is a young man of good appearance and good address and I think on the square in everything. He has been a bookkeeper in
several business houses and understands about doing business. I don’t think this selling at the Centennial should interfere
with the legitimate business of a local canvasser. The right to sell there might be reserved by Mr. Bliss. Loomis would like the job if
the American Publishing Company will give it to him; if not they can put a man of their own at the Centennial quartz mill to attend to
the matter It strikes me that a good many books would be sold, but you know more about these things than I do. I am now
telling our people that my book will be out about the 1st of February, but I don’t know a thing
about it more than what you last wrote me. Dozens and dozens ask me about the infernal book every day. I am becoming tired of hearing it mentioned. I find
that every old bummer in town expects to find his name in it. I am under many obligations to the photographers John S Noe and E Hurd, and should like a note to be struck in at the
bottom of some page saying that the illustrations of mills, dumps and machinery are from photographs by them. I enclose the
a note that will cover the whole ground. I have been slinging into the Enterprise an occasional humorous sketch and, as I notice that
some of them are being widely coppied shall stick my name to them whenever I can, as it may help the sale of the book. Now things are
mainly credited to the Enterprise. Stocks are moving upward.
I resumed my weekly reports on the mines with the new year. To-morrow (Monday) I shall go through the Con. Va.
and California with John Mackey. It will be my first trip into the lower levels since my
return. I shall go through the Belcher in three or four days. Having resumed my mining reports I must brave the underground regions
again. It is far from agreeable.
My regard to Mrs Clemens, Bliss and son and Williams, the artist. As ever yours, Dan.
P.S. I have spoken to Mackey about those letters. He has them of all kinds—German French and all
stripes. He don’t know what is in the foreign letters as he has not prospected them D
The dedication business I have just “knocked off” on another sheet may not be in regular
order but it is about what I want to say; also the note about the pictures. John Mackay made part of his multimillion-dollar fortune in the Consolidated Virginia and California mines, in
which the big bonanza strike of 1874 was made. In a letter of 17 September
1875, Clemens had asked Wright to inquire of Mackay and other wealthy mine investors
for “begging letters” to add to his collection of “this sort of literature” (L6, 439 n. 9, 535). Wright’s dedication as published read: TO JOHN MACKAY, Esq.
prince of miners
and “boss” of the big bonanza
is this book
respectfully inscribed
His published preface was:
I have put all I had to say into the body of this book; but, being informed that a preface is a necessary evil, I
have written this one.
the author
His credit to the photographers, which appeared at the head of the “List of Illustrations,”
read: Note
H. B. Loomis (d. 1893) was until 1881 a local reporter on the Enterprise, the Gold Hill
(Nevada) Evening News, and other papers. Hurd and Noe (d. 1889) were well-known local photographers (Doten 1973, 2: passim, esp. 1380; 3: passim, esp. 1735, 2232).
Source text(s):
ELEMENT: encodingDesc
ELEMENT: projectDesc
The illustrations of mining works, scenery, and machinery are from photographs taken on the
spot by John S. Noe and E. Hurd, of Virginia City, Nevada. (Wright 1876, v, xxix,
xxxix)
Copy-text:Previous publication:
Berkove 1988, 8–9.
Provenance:The MS was one of nine letters from Clemens to Wright which after Wright’s death “were left with his daughter,
Mell Evans. She, in turn, passed them on to her daughter, Irma Evans Morris. Effie Mona Mack learned of them while doing research for
Mark Twain in Nevada (Mack 1947), and purchased
photographic negatives of them” (Berkove 1988, 4, 18 n. 1). Mrs.
Morris bequeathed the letters to her three children. After Evans Morris’s death in 1990, the letters were sold, and most
were purchased from Admirable Books in March 1993 by CLjC.
